Tabletop Gaming Rants: Rodents get the raw deal

Well since MMO game mechanics/tropes are not to be discuss...at all...I'll move onto Tabletop gaming, the one bastion of games we geeks have left on this board apparently.

R.O.U.S.

Rodents Of Unusual Size.

Pretty much the first thing a GM use to place any players unfamiliar with the game system against. Normally nothing more than fodder for a starting adventurer and rarely, if ever, used after this moment.

Rats have become a cliche in themselves even for this use, most prefering to simply use monster like Kobolds instead of resorting to ROUS.

Isn't it time these unloved rodents got a day in the limelight once more?

While they're overused in other media, in PnPRPGs they've slowly vanished from usage.

Of course there are exceptions, in the Warhammer tabletop wargaming and PnPRPG the ROUS is the calling card of Skaven involvement and normally the first sign of something not being quite right with the location.

So ROUS, you may be hated in some circles but in PnPRPG we do still love you.

Perhaps it is nostalgia for days gone by but I for one would like to see atleast one GM include a basement full of rats to be cleaned out as a homage to this early days of PnP gaming.

Perhaps people can even include their PnP stories of encountering the ROUS if you'd like.

Now this would be a hilarious addition!

Give the rats some sort of hive mind and hidden agenda, the damn things can chew through almost anything! Could go one step further and make them radioactive Rats, to bring them in line with the COH universe.

Edit:

Must get back into an PnPRPG some time in the future!

While I have been a D&D 3.5 DM, I never got around to using rats as I took over a campaign already in progress and the characters were too high level for rats. At least that was what I thought at the time. However, the common rat has two things going for it that evil DMs should consider:

1. They're small enough to come in swarms.
2. They are common animals, and can be augmented with templates.

Those that know 3.5 D&D will know what I'm getting at there, but I'll just explain anyway. A swarm is a group of tiny creatyres that occupy a 5" by 5" square. They are significant in two ways as they are pretty hard to kill and if you stand in their square, you get hit, no matter how good you are at dodging. For a normal rat, it's not so bad. Plus a Fireball can wipe a swarm out pretty fast. Which is where the templates come in. A template is more or less adding half of another creature or converting the creature into one of a different type. Like Half-dragon, Fire Elemental, Incorporeal, Pseudonatural*, Angelic and so on. Get creative.

This makes it possible to create rats of practically any challenge rating, if you're mad enough you could make some Epic Rats, and have the player characters not just fight rats at level 1, but all the way through their careers. And no one feels safe when there's a swarm of angelic, incorporeal rats heading your way with 5-30 points of damage per turn.

*Pseudonatural is particularly fun trait to give the rats. It basically means "wrong". Like "Oh god, that's not supposed to have tentacles and teeth there!" wrong. Imagine a rat turning itself inside out, revealing a scary amount of internal teeth and tentacles then latching on to the Rogue's face. That's a Pseudonatural rat. Now imagine 20 of them in a swarm.

The trouble with rats as an early game adversary is that they don't really work in the context of a beginner fight (unless you're characters start as children or something). An initial fight needs to be as simple and straight forward as possible, against a single opponent who will only respond with direct damage. Initially, it seems easy to simply make rats exactly that, but players have sort of figured out how preposterous this is. Assuming even the most basic of combat abilities, you're having players grossly overuse force to take care of a simple pest.

This leads to the idea of "not just a rat" which includes the ever popular giant rats that fit the first fight requirements just as well while also justifying the use of force that will likely be soon turned against things like bandits and the like. The problem here is that giant rats pretty much lose all their rat like properties and may as well be wolves or some other large mammal.

I think the problem with rats is that they've been stereotyped as a basic, beginner threat, but to be properly rat like, they need to be dangerous as a swarm, which puts them in a more complex and therefore advanced category than where most people expect them. McNum definitely has the right idea. Fighting "a rat" never made any sense and became harder and harder to justify as minis and *other*: means of visualizing the concept became popular. Rats are a great option, but only when they're used as rats; small, numerous, and scattering.

For what it's worth, back in 2nd Ed AD&D, I used bunny rabbits. A dozen of them.

I was running a small game for two friends, and the bunnies nearly killed their (hugely overpowered) characters. Yes, the characters were only first level, but one was a first level Ogre Magi, and the other was something just as unbalanced.

The characters limped away from that fight, barely alive, and NEVER SPOKE OF IT AGAIN. Yes, they moved on to bigger and better things, but... bunnies. Trained attack bunnies.

*shudder*

Well, there is always "Big Ears, Small Mouse", from WhiteWolf :-)

Have used rats in P-n-P Champions games. Now, these were high-tech rats, piloting miniature armored vehicles, fighter planes, and six-foot-tall "giant robots". But they *were* rats. Some even went independent and formed their own hero group (the Rodent Defense Service).

I'd reply but...

The heavy handed, unresponsive and poorly thought out choices of those in charge lately have me seriously looking for more welcoming pastures.


Lets just hope nobody mentions the forbidden in this one...

Bah! When my boss plays and needs giant rats, he gets REAL ones. The office pets.

Yeah, they might nibble on the counters a bit, pee all over everything, and try to climb someone, looking for some food. But hey! VERISIMULTUDE KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

No problem with being modded. If I break the rules it's to be expected.
What I have a problem with is unique and thought provoking threads vanishing without justifiable cause. I'm dismayed at the direction things are going is all. Since the rules change was supposed to lesson the amount of Mod work, yet has increased it significantly.

Go figure.

Eh what can you do?

Even the fact Castle has posted in the thread that shall not be named did not save it and I did ask Mod06 if he could reinstate it but got a kindly worded but firm no as the response and that in order to discuss the tropes of MMOs you would end up even hinting at another MMO which is why they're not allowed.

Anyway back on topic.

Speaking of which has there ever been a Borrowers PnPRPG, now there's a scenario where a regular rat goes from 'why did you get me to beat this up again?' to 'oh my god, it's going to kill us all!'.

Personally I'd use the Rat as a fakeout fight, you see the giant rat everyone prepares for it, then the cat (which to a tiny person like a Borrower would be the equivilent of Godzilla) comes along and noms it midfight, if you stay to try and face the moggy of doom then you're a goner so you have to flee.

Would reinforce the players that some things are just not meant to be beaten in that world unless you have a small army of tiny people.

Of course there's always a bigger cat

The first RPG I played was TMNT, this was before I ever read the comic book. One of the adventures in the book for starting players was a retelling of the first TMNT comics. To the point you started off fighting



one or two at a time and then you end up fighting a whole, whole bunch.

What I find ironic is this are small robotic mouse cacther in a game where you have to option to play as a R.O.U.S. with Kung Fu powers.

I got around the ROUS "issue" a long time ago. I realized that while monster are good adversaries for the characters, the most deadly foes are NPCs, equipped similarly to the players. This makes it fairly easy to scale the difficulty of the fights to keep the players from either walking all over their foes, or getting steamrolled in their first encounter. An added bonus is that many of my players had memorized the Monster Manual (back when I played D&D, many years ago). With custom NPCs, the players can't say, "Oh that's Monster X, from page 53 of the MM. I use a flask of burning oil, as flame is its weakness".

So yeah, I tend to avoid the ROUS in encounters for new characters. I may throw something similar in every once in a while, but it's typically a sideshow to the real adventure.

Reminds me of another dirty DM rat trick to pull: Awakened Rats.

High level Druids get a spell called Awakening. It grants sentience to a non-sentient creature. Like a rat. Suddenly you're looking at a rat that's quite possibly smarter than some of the player characters. And can take class levels. Rats make nasty Rogues, and, of course, everything Wizard, Cleric or Druid is just plain wrong.

Of course, it's much more fun to spring Rat Paladins on the players. Lawful Good Holy Knight rats riding holy roaches out to avenge their fallen comrades. Or, pull a Tucker's Kobolds* only using sentient rats. "Clear out the rats from the basement" becomes "Enter the rats' heavily trapped and fortified basement stronghold full of rat-sized passages that allows the rats to move freely around while you have to take the long way". You only need one or two awakened rats to coordinate the rest for something like that.

I miss playing D&D some times, especially being a DM. It's a lot of preparation, but the reactions you can get from the players are well worth it, even if they go wildly off course compared to what you thought. Then it pays to have dirty tricks like these ready.

*Tucker's Kobolds, a demonstration on how to play by the book Kobolds in a way that scares even midlevel player characters. To quote the article: "NOOOOOO!!! It's THEM! Run!!!" If the reaction you get from your players when doing a Kobold encounter is any less than that, you're playing them wrong.